An affordable, rugged, secure, and open hardware platform for battery powered connected things with ESP32

Firstly, I apologize for the missed shipping date for the first batch of pledges. It was scheduled for the first week of June. When we were planning the manufacturing schedule, we wanted to make and ship a batch of 100 ESP32 Hornbill Dev boards as soon as the campaign ended. Although we had parts for manufacturing the first batch, we did not start it for the following reasons:

Automated Assembly: For smaller batches we do manual assembly of the boards. However since ESP32 Dev Board was ordered in bigger quantites we want to do an automated assembly so that everyone gets better boards.

Design Iteration: We also did one more design iteration with the feedback received to make the designs more rugged.

Wire Transfers: Since the transaction amounts were higher, we use wire transfers to save on fees, and realized they can take more time than anticipated.

After the campaign, our revised plan was to do a single batch of 500 boards. We had received the funds from Crowd Supply mid-way through the campaign, so we thought it would be possible to pull off, but, because of the above reasons, we weren’t able to pull it off.

Current Status

Except for the 400 ESP32 modules, we have all the parts to manufacture all the pledges. We are awaiting shipment for the ESP32 modules to start the manufacturing.
This should happen by end of next week (by 18th of June). We expect the manufacturing and testing to complete by 30th of June and ship the boards in the first week of July.
We will try and beat these estimates and ship it as soon as we can.

Here are some pictures that make us feel good of the work we have done during this time. Let’s start with the Assembled Hornbill IDL (Industrial Data Logger) Board.

We had planned to ship parts to make the kit, however we thought that this deserved a dedicated PCB. We now have a fully tested ready to go logger with prototyping space!

Next up is the fully assembled Hornbill OUR (Open Universal Remote) PCB.

And this is the final design for Hornbill ESP32 Dev board that will go into production.

We also made test jig for the Dev board.

The jig will make testing a lot more easier and faster. We can ship boards without soldering the pin headers, so that you may use the ones you like.

And finally all the parts and PCBs made for the campaign.

Thank you for supporting Hornbill, we are all excited to manufacture and ship you the goodies.